You dont have to be a top spender to be the King of Kings. King of thieves is play to win. I have succesfully taken the throne two times (March 2016, February 2017), and I will write down some tips to anyone who would like to take on the crown. Note that some things may have changed over almost a year, so I will try and keep the numbers & tips up to date.

First, i will post my preparations, and my main tactics used to win my KOKL (King of Kings League). Then in my next 3 replies, i will talk about actual stuff that happend in that battle.

Preparations

1) Save up some orbs. My first round cost me only 2500 orbs. Its not hard to save up. I ran for KOK with a budget of 3.5K orbs, and had leftovers. On my second round, I used up 9000 orbs, because i was fighting another top player for the throne. However 3000 orbs is still an up-top-date number and should be more than enough as long as you follow some other guidlines.

I estimate farming of 750 orbs a week is possible for freemium players. Without any effort, its easily around 500.

200 from winning a gods league and demotion next round (that 7th day fills in for using smaller gods leagues to win instead of totemius)

150 from weekly challenges

60 from winning guild battles (again, that 7th day fills to calculate lost battles)

210 = 30 orbs a day (up to around 30-50 is possible i believe) from doors = 210

15 orbs for leveling up 3 times

20 orbs a week by watching just 3 ads a day (i dont do this ) [ads for one free orb were removed ]

45 orbs by putting in a Unique gem for the last few minutes of a ritual and bieng online for that time. (Cant do it with every ritual, but works frequently)

50 orbs a week from the maze if you are lucky

Keep in mind you can also earn 5-7 potions a day from doors. thats also around a value of 300 extra orbs a week!

I stacked around 20/20/50/20/10 and used almost all of them (except ghost pot lol), saving me around 600 orbs
This is why you should always pop keys into doors. If you dont want to raid much, just retrieve a few gems.

Also, although it was reduced, guild seasons still gives a few orbs, up to 500 a month for the top prize.

2) Pick a date (Sounds simple, but this is actually very critical.)

For example, my week schedule enables a Wednesday-Friday time where i could play a lot. Thats why it was obvious i will only go for KOK when it falls into this range. Leagues are 3 days long, so a league starts on the same day every 21 days. thats once in every 3 weeks. Only settle for the best time.

(Note: if you assume you play the win totemius/lose totemius role to farm orbs, you may have to stay in league once without promotion/demotion so you get into the KOK league you want to participate in. Or if you can play a lot, the top 30 in KOKL are not demoted after the round ends.)

3) Do your Homework (Literally, and figuratively)

3/a) Work ahead as much as you can, so you can play more. More time = more gems

3/b) Lookout for potentiol competition. Do research, ask around in your guild, and check in telegram applications' and FB AAF rooms, You DO NOT want to go for KOK when a person with 30k orbs is about to go for KOK. You have to bail in time so you dont lose much. If you are well informed, pulling back won't cause a lot of wasted effort.

For example, there was a guy in the telegram chat room, who posted he has 30k orbs, and that he wants the KOK outfit a few hours before KOK league starts.
To my best of luck, I noticed he was still in totemius, and when I checked every name in KOKL, he wasnt there. The poor guy lost totemius. That was my green light in the morning to go for KOK. Untill I checked every name in the league, it would have been a mistake to even try.

3) Investigate the guild battles of the top guilds. When top guilds are put together in a guild battle, they will play harder to beat each other. This will both create indirect competition in KOKL, and also these guilds will vacuum up som gold gems.

A lazy way to do this is to check the scores about 12-24 hours after the league starts. If you see multiple players from the same guild in the top 5-10, that indicates potential competition. (If anyone has a significant lead, it may not neccesarily mean they are going for the throne. Sometimes players are lucky and snatch up remaining giveaways, so dont be afraid to try and beat them.)

Tactics

1)Make a budget. you should divide your orbs in to categories. For example, i estimated my budget to be:

1500 orbs for respins (Wouldn't want to leave any gold gems out there )

A Budget plan is most important. it lets you see what are the smallest gems you will raid, and what gems to go for. My budget plan told me, it would be a most awful approach to raid for deep spiked silvers, as it would cost a tremendous amount of orbs to free up the slots afterwords. (On my second run, I raided for deep spiked silvers also, and that showed on the total spendature of 9K orbs)

Due to the cost of orbing rituals, raiding for deep spiked gems equals around 1k orbs/1M gemscore. Whereas if you skip more, you can steal a potencially semiperfect for around 50 orbs. You do the math.

My approach was:

Raid the easy deep spikeds, but dont really bother for them. Skip any base you can't 3 star with one or two potions.

As you can see, for a low budget, its obvious: Raid for gold gems only. Pick up the deep spikes with minimal orbs though if they are easy to steal though.

Potencially, you could get 1 semiperfect for every 100 orbs or less you start with. If you get just a quarter of this value in practice, you are in a good spot.

2) Gem hiding (be aware of it)

You dont have to use this ttactic. However you must assume others could be using it.

Commonly, people may intentionally lose a gem, to lower their deltas. this is scary because:

You dont know that the person in second place could be hiding semiperfects, and pretending to have given up, with the intention of retrieveng them last second and beating you.

You dont know if the current leader is ahead by the difference in your score, or more.

Long story short, I just did my best not to lead by just under a constant of X times 999,999.

Example:

1st place: 4M

2nd place 3.2M.
In this case, player 2 could always stay behind by a few 100k, and retrieve a 1M gem near the end to beat player 1.

If this case applies near the end of round, start panicing and steal a few smaller gems that you would ordinarily not steal.

How to counter it? Just take a lot of screenshots of the top 10 people in the league, and make sure nobody is consistently dropping 1-2 million gems.

3) Skipping time

Pay attention to what time of the day you are skipping. Sometimes I would steal millions in the morning, and then nothing for 6 hours. Make sure you are there to skip when the golds feel more likely.

For this reason, I made sure to wake up 30-60 minutes early on the second & third day (and yes it really paid off).
I assume that this was a time of day, when fewer players were active globally (or just on the same continent), and early skipping could get you to your gold gems more easily without as much competition.

Also keep in mind there are much more players on weekend usually! That is why i prefer pulling larger scores on weekdays.

Now notice, (if there is no competition between top players,) then after a battle ends with a 10M+ winner, the next one is usually much lower. Thats almost a 40% drop in gemscore required relatively. It is quite rare for the same player to go for KOK twice in a row (although possible), since it can be very tiresome in some cases.

This probably doesnt matter much, but it gave me some extra confidence.

5) Watch out for login offset

After playing the game for 6 hours without taking a 3 hour break, you will be forced to take a 3 hour break. Time this so you don't get kicked out at times you could spend skipping. The easiest way to avoid any issues is taking a 3 hour break in the middle of the day. This is priceless, since getting kicked 1-2 hours before the league ends could cost you a victory.

6) Take small breaks

Skipping is tiresome. skipping 6 hours in a row is even more so. If you fall into the zone, and just end up skipping with your brain half asleep, you could end up skipping 999k gems. With a fresh mind, you can avoid some of these situations. I tend to take a 10-15 minute break if I havent found even a deep spiked silver gem in the last 10 minutes and start seeing the same names over and over again, since when you continue skipping after the break, you will probably start finding different players.

rough start to the league, jelly platform with the bounce-off-the-corner-into-the-totem-glitch jump.

This one was a strong design in a casual base. Didnt die on the spinner first time, so it was really tough to dt the spinner AFTER dying to another trap first. I passed the spawn jumps enough times, and managed to dt the spinner in about 4 tries

Again a decent base. you had to slide a little before perfect corner jumping to avoid the homing. After dying to the spinner i used a combo of time slow pot, and strategically suiciding milliseconds after i failed the corner pop. Managed to dt the homing cannon and reach the totem with 6 deaths.

A decent start to the battle. Ethan already played strong from the first minute.

This picture illustrates why you should go for the easy deep spiked gems. almost a baby gold.

Mid-day:

This base had a long runway perfect corner jump. i passed it on my first try. It hurt when i was approaching the rg again and realized i was about to fail.

very OP platform base, i was happy to reach the totem at all. Spinner likes to be a big troll. didnt get it on the 40 orb respin so i stopped.

Afternoon:

Hard timing jump, i messed it up unfortunately. Statistics paid off luckily and got it.

So this looks like a convenient time really. But will be in about 2 weeks. Looks as if any lvl 45+ player could do this. It also helps that we can view the KoK league can be viewed once you reach the God's leagues.

Every gem i stole, i fused into a semiperfect in one ritual (Usually 600k + 2 baby golds, or 800k + baby gold + deep spiked). This saved me a lot of orbs. If i calculate well i finished 7-8 rituals with orbs, and 5 without orbs during that time, so thats 800 orbs (i got a few times 15 orbs back by fusing unique gems into the mix).

Edit: i will add this to the guide section of the thread as it may be usedul! Thanks for asking

You stole that one from me by the way . This was the second time sb stole it on 1 star. I'm glad it meant sth to you at least

By the way i found 5 golden gems(3 deep, 2 small) during that round but i didn't compete for anything( was in Invicius). 2 of them i skipped(2 semi-perfects perhaps), 1 i didn't get to spin for(900K one) even tho i 3 stared the base, the other 2 i stole, sadly they were the small ones.